LinkedLegislation Blog

In my previous post, I discussed how to define similarity for bills in Congress. Given a new bill, which other bills are similar, and how are they related?We're building applications to let researchers look up any bill and get a list of similar bills. To do this, we separate the... [Read More]

Bills are often recycled. Most bills introduced in Congress are very similar to bills that have been introduced in a previous session. This reflects the imbalance between the number of bills that are proposed and bills that actually become law. Many bills are introduced for the purpose of "messaging" and... [Read More]

When I tell people that I help Congress become more transparent and efficient, they invariably say: "Good luck with that." I'm happy to report that we have, actually, had some good luck with that.I work with Xcential, a company that has deep expertise modernizing legislative systems, from building the drafting system... [Read More]

I was distracted yesterday. I saw a tweet by Alberto Cairo (@albertocairo) about a new web-based tool to convert data to sound. I have thought a lot about 'visualization' in sound since my days doing electrophysiology of locust brains at Caltech (I was even acknowledged for 'helpful comments' in a Nature paper).... [Read More]

Pope Francis published a remarkable document today, called the "Gaudete et exsultate", an exhortation to holiness. He says its goal is to "repropose the call to holiness in a practical way for our own time". The philosophy of the document is bold and modern. Each of its 177 numbered paragraphs, in five... [Read More]